The Solution and the Problem

There's the rub. The online ad rates will never catch up.

Web advertising is a completely different animal than print, and it will never be as valuable. The problem is we use the Web differently than we do newspapers or even television.

With newspapers, people took time to digest the entire paper -- news and ads. A well-crafted ad could sometimes generate as much chatter as a strong news story. Merchants frequently had customers pop in the store and say, "Hey, saw your ad in the paper ..."

Same with television. While some people flitter about, jumping from channel to channel during commercials, many more people will sit and absorb the advertisters' messages.

We don't use the Web that way. Other than the commercials that load before a video you want to watch, we have trained our eyes to look around the ads online. The click-through rates are abysmal and getting SMALLER. The majority of Web ads are worth squat, and merchants are paying accordingly.

The bottom line is we're giving away the content. And we're basically giving away the advertising space. And the only way we're able to keep these sites afloat is by bleeding the print product dry.

I don't have the solution. I don't know all the answers. But I do know that we are on the exact wrong course today.

 

Nothing is wrong with it at all and more papers should employ the tactic.

I don't believe people like it, though. I hate clicking on ESPN.com because of the damn TV clip that automatically starts.

If something I want to read online has an ad I cannot skip, I don't read it and move on. Maybe the site gets its "hit" or "click" or whatever to count. If so, bully for them. But I don't want to watch a 45-second ad for the University of Phoenix before I read today's baseball story.

 

Moddy, you mention that you read the AJC article online from 500 miles away. That's the beauty of the Web - I can read it wherever I am. If I live in California, I can catch up on my hometown team, even if I no longer get the newspaper because I live 2,000 miles away. I don't know how many hits most stories get from people outside of the circulation area, but anything that gets hits seems like a plus to me. Someone will find a way to make money on Web advertising...and when that happens, all those extra hits will add up. Or so I hope. That's what gets me to sleep at night.

 

Here's a paper that teases to its print version: www.vnews.com

It runs 3-5 print stories on its web site and the ledes of some others that appear in full only in print. See what you think. It annoys the heck out of me as a long-distance/internet reader, but maybe they've got the right idea?

 

I get bitched at a lot because I never put all our local stories on the Web. I put our main story or three, but I leave off a lot of the minor local stuff so people have to buy the paper.

They bitch at me, but they never threaten me or anything. So, I keep doing it my way.

 

We tried a variety of web strategies around this time last year, including just the highest stories, just the lowest stories, just the leads and posting well after the print version has hit the street. I don't know if any of them work. The problem with the first two (as it relates to us) is the deluge of angry phone calls alleging favoritism, the just the leads approach basically insults the reader (You want to know how this ends? Buy the damned paper, you cheapskate!), and posting late doesn't lead people to buy the paper, they just read it later or not at all.

I think Moddy's "Give me something to read" edict makes sense. I think it was Molly Ivins who said modern papers are facing financial crisis by making themselves smaller and less useful. If we're all going into the shit-can anyhow, why not do it producing five years of quality work instead of eight years of crap?

 

One thing we do with some of the meatier special sections is not to publish them on the Web site until the next day, making them exclusive to print for 24 hours. Don't have any numbers to prove that it actually does anything, but it's one of our attempts to get around giving stuff away for free.

 

Teasing to the print version reminded me of this Hunter S. Thompson story:

Paul William Roberts in his Toronto Globe and Mail article of Saturday, February 26, 2005 wrote how he imagined an obituary should begin:

"Hunter telephoned me on Feb. 19, the night before his death. He sounded scared. It wasn't always easy to understand what he said, particularly over the phone, he mumbled, yet when there was something he really wanted you to understand, you did. He'd been working on a story about the World Trade Center attacks and had stumbled across what he felt was hard evidence showing the towers had been brought down not by the airplanes that flew into them but by explosive charges set off in their foundations. Now he thought someone was out to stop him publishing it: "They're gonna make it look like suicide," he said. "I know how these bastards think..."

However, Roberts goes on to state:

"That's how I imagine a tribute to Hunter S. Thompson should begin. He was indeed working on such a story, but it wasn't what killed him..."

As the Globe and Mail website required pay-per-view for the full article, viewers who only read the partial text mistakenly believed it to be genuine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson

 

I have to completely disagree with this. It is like stating an opinion in the paper without backing it up.

Do you have the research to show that ads are not clicked on any less than people bring an ad to the store from the newspaper? Or that they see an ad in the paper any more than the internet?

At my shop the internet is read by just as many people as the print product and I suspect it is the same at almost all places. Unique visitors to websites per month vs circulation is not that far off.

If we are to make it at all the internet ads have to catch up. They are worth just as much.

The next generation, who spends an average of 3 hours a day online starts buying the ads will realize their value. Right now, it is not these people in charge of buying ads, though and we suffer because of it. Personally if I had a company right now, all I would do is internet advertising. It is a much better value for my money, unless I am trying to get people to use my product who over the age of 65.

Also, people do not read the ads in the paper either, only coupons. I never even notice them. Myself, under 30, I notice online ads more. Today on this website their were ads for Asian girls, live psychic readings and the University of Phoenix. Only the U of P is page as I post.

Maybe one idea is to have coupons online as a way to track generated business, so we can prove to customers that people see them.

I know the numbers on our internet site says we have as many unique visitors as we do subscribers and I also can tell any advertiser exactly where they are from (down to the city at least), how long they looked at a page, what their demographic is (through registry), where they came from (bookmark, yahoo, google) and how many pages each of them saw. I also can tell them exactly how many times their ad was clicked.

Can a print ad do any of that???

 

I can back up my argument with two pretty strong pieces of evidence.

* No. 1 -- Do a Google search for click-through rates. You will find any number of articles explaining that the rates are miserable and getting worse.

Here's one from Business Week last November. The title is "So many ads, so few clicks." http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_46/b4058053.htm

* No. 2 -- The ad rates are what they are. They're not even in the same stratosphere with print advertising.

You can believe that's all going to change magically one day, but I haven't seen any indication. You ask me for my proof that things aren't going to get better. I'd be curious how you plan on proving that they're going to get better ... other than the fact that you really, really want them to.

 

See, that's the thing ... I can watch TV shows with the commercials edited out. I can block pop-up ads and X out of other ads I don't want to read.

I can't get a subscription to the print version of the newspaper with no ads. The ad on the page with the jump of that great feature is always going to be on that page, and it might be sitting face-up on the coffee table all day at the office for people to notice on break.

That page isn't going to have a different ad the next time you turn back to it. It'll be the same ad. The company that paid for it knows that, and it knows there is a huge difference between a newspaper ad and a lot of the alternatives.

Write great stories and publish great art between those ads every day. Make people feel like they have to get the paper every day, make them worry that they're missing something if they miss looking at the paper for one day, and those ads will be worth more -- again.

Especially if you don't give away all of that content elsewhere.

But you can't do it after slashing staff to the bone.

I truly believe all of that, even if it makes me a dinosaur.